America hating killbot

The good Roger Ailes points out that the Liberty Film Festival isn’t taking a dirt nap  like Jesse Helms; it’s just resting its eyes:

Unlike the p.r. flacks manipulating the corpse of Jesse Helms, the proprietors of the Liberty Film Festival couldn’t bother maintain the fiction that the festival survived to see the Fourth:

July 3rd, 2008

Dear Liberty Film Festival friends and supporters,

The Liberty Film Festival is currently on hiatus. We want to thank all the filmmakers who have submitted their projects to us. Films submitted to us through July 3rd, 2008 will still be considered for screening events, but we are no longer accepting submissions at this time.

Please return to this website for further announcements regarding the Liberty Film Festival.

Thank you, and best wishes,

Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty

LFF Co-Founders & Co-Artistic Directors

This is puzzling indeed. Why, it seems like just seven days ago that LFF was crowing about its amazing growth and success:

The first festival featured 20 films and 3,000 people turned up, with "people saying, ‘This is our Woodstock,’" said Murty. "Each year, we saw our submissions doubling." This year, Liberty’s Internet presence is increasing, with trailers, shorts, features, streamlining, DVD sales and film reviews from conservative critics.

And nothing increases one’s internet presence like going on hiatus and refusing submissions. Or failing to post any content to your site the six months before that.

But, as they say, every time God shuts down a film festival, he opens up time better spent writing important film criticism. In this case, Jason provides some Cahiers du cinéma-style essaying  on Wall-E:

As predicted, the controversy over the ‘worldview’ of Pixar’s new film Wall*E is spreading like wildfire (see here and here and here). I’d like to offer a hat-tip, by the way, to my old pal Greg Pollowitz at National Review for his role in kicking off this whole controversy. So far I’ve basically taken a pass on the subject, because the whole thing depresses me and I’m not eager to subject myself to the propaganda Pixar-Disney is currently doling out. [Memo to Disney: we’re all still waiting for that Path to 9-11 DVD release, by the way.]

Conservatives are understandably up in arms about what is apparently depicted in this film (Earth as Matrix-style, hyper-corporate, eco-apocalpytic wasteland), although we’ve been getting this sort of thing from Hollywood for quite some time. I think that a lot of conservative ire, however, is emerging from the mistaken impression that Pixar was somehow friendly to the conservative and/or libertarian side to begin with. Ever since Pixar’s The Incredibles came out several years ago, I’ve seen it hyped in conservative-libertarian circles to no end, to the point that people began to believe that there was actually some kind of pseudo-libertarian cabal of people who ran Pixar.

[...]

Folks at Pixar have been dropping hints like this for years, but never really very much substantial. [A few nods in Ayn Rand’s direction in The Incredibles, Andrew Stanton saying he’s a Christian, etc.] Lo and behold, we now find that Pixar’s actually pretty much like everybody else working in the system. To have expected anything else is really to be naive.

I’ve been telling fellow conservatives for years: avoid wish-fantasies about people/companies in the Hollywood system who are sold to you as being ‘conservative.’ These people are subject to extraordinary professional pressures that will usually compromise what they can do or say. If you want to express yourself freely, embrace independent film, digital technology, and the extraordinary opportunities those two worlds currently offer. Or else be prepared for more ‘disappointments’ like Wall*E.

Oh sure.

Taking down yet another number three in al-Squirla

Tell that to the starry-eyed film student who maxed out his Discover card and  spent the last seven months filming and editing Sgt. Rock Badass vs. The Islamosquirrels of Doom only to have the bestest (and only) conservative flag-waving America-humping film festival pack up and skip town like Dr. Lao’s circus.

Dream factory, my ass…..